Djokovic Roars Into His Comfort Zone — and Zverev — in Shanghai

If you were to look at a match and say, “THAT, folks, is how you play tennis,” you could not pick a much better example than Novak Djokovic’s win over Kevin Anderson on Friday in Shanghai.

Djokovic served consistently and effectively. He made Anderson work in his early service games. Anderson, though, served well on big points and managed to continue to hold. Djokovic continued to get balls back on return and make Anderson work for his service points on a fast surface in Shanghai. He didn’t get any breaks in the first set but announced his presence.

Djokovic faced only one break point on his own serve in the first set — merely one break point in a whole set of tennis against a top-eight player is pretty darn good — and he calmly saved it. Djokovic got to 6-6 after responding well to pressure and then played an A-plus lockdown-level tiebreaker, after which he broke Anderson early in the second set and rolled to a 7-6, 6-3 win to send him into the Shanghai semifinals, where he will play Sascha Zverev, a winner over Kyle Edmund in Friday’s first quarterfinal.

The first set was highly reminiscent of the top-shelf Laver Cup match between Djokovic and Anderson… until the tiebreaker. Anderson, in Chicago a few weeks ago, was playing before a home crowd back then, having attended the University of Illinois and playing for a Team World side which was heartily supported by most of those in attendance that weekend. He won the first-set tiebreaker and eventually won in a deciding supertiebreaker to fuel Team World’s comeback.

In this first-set tiebreaker, Djokovic snuffed out any hopes that Anderson would be able to make a second hardcourt Masters semifinal this season (his first one coming in Toronto). Djokovic’s groundstrokes were perfectly calibrated. He possessed absolute clarity and married it with precise execution of a full range of shots. Anderson had to be perfect to keep up, and he wasn’t. Anderson played well, but after giving it his best shot in a full-length set, Anderson had nothing to show for it.

This is what Djokovic, in true Big 3 fashion, has done to so many of his peers so often over the years. What is worth noting here is that whereas some tiebreaker sets are close because neither player plays well enough to separate himself from the opponent, this was a set in which two players played very well… only for Djokovic to then make a supreme statement of superiority at the end of it. Djokovic carried that statement through the entirety of set two. He cooled down a hot player and turned the tables relative to the best singles match played at the Laver Cup.

Anderson can tell himself — and he wouldn’t be wrong or dishonest with himself if he does — that he can play close sets with Djokovic on a relatively consistent basis. The Wimbledon final, after a 6-hour, 36-minute match against John Isner, did not leave Anderson in the best possible position to show what he could do against Djokovic. These more recent meetings in the autumn of 2018 have provided a better representation of how well Anderson can compete. The South African improved his chances this week of making the ATP Finals for the first time. He can legitimately say that his season is still reaching new heights.

Yet, the difference between playing close sets and winning close sets — while in some ways small (Anderson was one point away from winning set one on Friday in China) — feels so large against Djokovic. This is true on any surface and in any set of conditions, but especially when Djokovic is so comfortable in his own skin.

Earlier in 2018, of course, Djokovic was still trying to find that comfortable place. It took him a necessary coaching change and other readjustments to find it, but it arrived at Wimbledon and grew in Cincinnati. It then remained in place on the final weekend (semifinals and championship match) at the U.S. Open, and is fully in evidence in China.

Djokovic now gets to face Zverev for the second time, the first since the 2017 Rome final. Tennis observers (this one included) have eagerly awaited another Djokovic-Zverev encounter. While Sascha — by making his first Shanghai semifinal — has improved his level of staying power throughout a full tennis season, he is not in the same league as Djokovic at the moment.

That is not a negative commentary on the German. It is simply a reflection of how locked in Djokovic is right now.

If you were to look at a tennis player and say, “This is how you play tennis,” Novak Djokovic is Example No. 1 on the ATP Tour in October of 2018. When he takes the court, he puts on a clinic.

One can’t make a much more positive comment about a Serbian tennis player in full flight, at the top of his game.

Matt Zemek is the co-editor of Tennis With An Accent with Saqib Ali. Matt is the lead writer for the site and helps Saqib with the TWAA podcast, produced by Radio Influence at radioinfluence.com. Matt has written professionally about men's and women's tennis since 2014 for multiple outlets: Comeback Media, FanRagSports, and independently at Patreon, where he maintains a tennis site. You can reach Matt by e-mail: mzemek@hotmail.com. You can find him on Twitter at @mzemek.

Roughly one-third of a century before Soderling, there was an even better version of him in men’s tennis, at least if we are talking strictly about on-court results and significant titles.

Soderling carved out a career rich in accomplishments and historic match victories. That career was cut short by health problems, but when Soderling played, he reached a considerable height. He didn’t become an iconic player, but his story will be more than a tiny footnote in his era, 50 years from now.

Younger generations of tennis fans are firmly aware of Soderling’s place in the history of the sport. In the 1970s, Adriano Panatta forged a very similar level of standing in men’s tennis.

We know that Soderling is one of only two men to ever beat Rafael Nadal at Roland Garros. Soderling also stopped Roger Federer’s legendary streak of 23 straight major-tournament semifinals reached with his win in 2010, one year after the earth-shaking upset of Nadal.

Panatta can boast of accomplishments which match the Soderling double in Paris: Panatta was the only man to beat Bjorn Borg at the French Open, and much as Soderling scored his two most historic wins in Paris, Panatta did as well. He beat Borg twice.

Panatta, though, took a few extra steps that Soderling wasn’t able to manage. Panatta won Roland Garros after his second win over Borg in 1976. In that same year, Panatta carried Italy to its first and still only Davis Cup championship. Panatta won three points in the Italians’ 4-1 win over Chile in the Davis Cup Final.

Panatta — in addition to his conquests of Borg, his major title at the French, and his Davis Cup triumph — played in one of the most memorable matches in U.S. Open history.

In 1978, the first year of the tournament’s existence on hardcourts at the current USTA National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows (after decades on the grass and then Har-Tru green clay courts of Forest Hills), Panatta engaged Jimmy Connors in a riveting five-set duel. In the 12th game of the fifth set — in the one major tournament which used a fifth-set tiebreaker at the time — Panatta could only watch as Connors hit one of the most remarkable shots in tennis history.

Panatta’s quality shines through not only in that match, but in the fact that this elite clay-court player was able to test Connors on U.S. Open hardcourts and make the Wimbledon quarterfinals. He struggled on grass but did not allow his struggles to permanently handcuff him on that surface. He displayed an ability to adjust to different circumstances and handle the pressure of competition, allowing his talent to emerge in full flower.

Panatta is, in many ways, the embodiment of what a modern-day Italian talent — Fabio Fognini — always had the ability to be, but has never managed to become.

Adriano Panatta is one of several players from the 1970s who will not be remembered by the global community of tennis fans the same way the giants of the period will continue to be. No, Panatta won’t be spoken of in the same breath as Connors and Borg and McEnroe, much as Soderling lives in the shadows of today’s Big 3 plus Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka.

Nevertheless, like Soderling, Panatta’s best moments ripple through the pages of time. He is a player — with several contemporaries from the 1970s — whose accomplishments and enduring quality should not be forgotten.

Marin Cilic Knows The Sunshine As Well As The Shadow

It is not easy to concisely summarize many athletes’ careers — not when those careers defy a neat and tidy form of categorization.

What does one say about Gilles Simon, so dogged and relentless yet prone to lapses in concentration? What does one say about Marius Copil, so clearly talented yet only beginning to (potentially) find his range and rhythm on a sustained basis as a professional?

Even the Big 3 are not easy to process — not in relationship to each other. Alone, their stories might be able to be digested and explained with great clarity, but in connection to their two great rivals, each man in that trio becomes a much more layered mystery. If the Big 3 were easy to define as a group, fans would not debate their levels of greatness to the extent they do.

At various tiers of men’s tennis, making sense of a career is not simple.

Of any prominent ATP career this century, few are harder to grasp than Marin Cilic, the king of complexity.

I hasten to say at the outset: Complexity is not bad. Complexity is part of life. Complexity invites us to not settle for the easy conclusion if the reality of a situation demands a more layered assessment.

So it is with Cilic, who helped Croatia win a Davis Cup for the first time in 2018, culminating in his two-point tie on the opponent’s soil against France. As I wrote on Sunday — and as I always stress with Davis Cup — this is not something to check off on a laundry list, a “to-do item” one coldly eliminates in a businesslike manner. This is a moment of profound national meaning for Croatia, especially since it was the last Davis Cup, and even more particularly because earlier in 2018, France had defeated Croatia in the World Cup Final. It meant a lot to the whole Croatian team to win the global championship in another sport. The fact that France happened to be the last obstacle was a bonus — for Cilic, and Borna Coric, and everyone else.

Yet, while this is a team competition, let’s not pretend that of the many dramatis personae in Lille, France, Cilic stood above them. His gut-wrenching loss to Juan Martin del Potro in the 2016 Davis Cup Final against Argentina was supremely shattering. Carrying that scar isn’t easy to do for athletes. We can see, in the second half of Cilic’s 2018 season, a lingering inability to straightforwardly finish sets and matches. “Is he going to blow it again?” is not a rare or infrequent question raised during many Cilic matches.

Yet, for all the questions Cilic elicits when he fails to make the ATP Finals semifinal round (zero appearances in four attempts), or fails to go deeper in a Masters 1000 than he could or should, this man just keeps coming back with notable resilience.

For much of the rest of the world, American individualism is a very ugly thing — not on a conceptual level (individualism can and does represent personal striving to break free of repression or groupthink), but on an applied level. No one needs to wonder which American person represents the excesses of individualism more than any other.

Tennis, however — even in a team concept — is an individual sport. (You might roll your eyes and groan when you read this, but, for the 9,734th time, the American sport of baseball is so much like tennis in this way: Baseball is a team sport defined by individual confrontations and performances. One pitcher goes up against one hitter.) Even with Davis Cup teammates cheering you on and a coach at courtside offering advice on sitdowns, the player has to go out and execute the game plan.

Few American artists are more associated with individualism than Frank Sinatra, who dominated the nation’s cultural consciousness during the decades-long prime of his career. You could ask, “Why select Sinatra out of various other entertainers or singers as an emblem of American individualism?” The answer: Sinatra’s life on and off stage was equally bold, consumed by a runaway appetite for success and pleasure. That doesn’t make him one of a kind, but Sinatra represented that way of being as well as any prominent American public figure in the 20th century. Moreover, unlike Elvis Presley — who exists on the same plane of global fame and American individualism — Sinatra also sang songs which were anthems of American individualism.

Purely as a reflection of a cultural ideal, no Elvis song from his own lengthy canon can match Sinatra’s tribute to American individual striving, “My Way,” which concludes with the following lyric:

The record shoowwws…

I took the blooowwws…

And did it myyyyyyyyyyyy waaaaaayyyyyyyyyyyyy…

This is American individualism, defined.

It is also the story of Marin Cilic. He does keep taking some very significant and high-impact punches, the punches which have caused many other careers to wither and die.

Consider, in the history of tennis, just a few examples of players who absorbed devastating losses and never really recovered from them: Nicole Vaidisova at Wimbledon in 2007 against Ana Ivanovic. Marcelo Rios to Dominik Hrbaty at the 1999 French Open. David Nalbandian in the 2006 Australian Open against Marcos Baghdatis.

So many athletes in various sports never recover from a major psychic blow. We’re only human, after all. We are not gods or monsters.

Cilic? He takes some very big, fat roundhouse punches to the jaw… but undeterred, he finds ways to keep coming back in a meaningful way. He has, to be very clear, redefined his career such that he won’t merely be remembered as “The guy who caught fire for one week at the 2014 U.S. Open, muddling through week one but then torching the field in week two with untouchably great tennis.”

No, he has transcended that narrow categorization and its accordingly limited narrative arc.

Cilic is a lot more than that.

The complexity of his career is not a bad thing. If anything, it is a virtue… because if his career had been easy to categorize, the negative probably would have outweighed the positive.

I don’t think you can make that claim about Cilic — not now. Not at the end of 2018.

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